Modern social networking systems are interactive and support frequent user inputs throughout the operation of the social networking system. There is a growing emphasis in social network development on user interfaces designed to ease communication between the system and humans.
However, one drawback of existing social networking interfaces is that they have little ability to take into account differences in the preferences, style, and knowledge of the users of the social networking systems. A social networking system can let a user select from a set of default styles and even store a user's own interface variations, but the latter process is manual and tedious. Clearly, there is a need for increased personalization in the area of user interface for the social networking system. The level of personalization needs to increase not only in the types of flexibility but also in the way that the personalization occurs. Currently, most social networking systems require that users determine or select their preferences explicitly to the user interface, which means the options are either limited in number or tiresome to complete. Moreover, some facets of user style or user preference may be reflected in users' behavior but not subject to conscious inspection.
The suboptimal user interface of the existing social networking systems can cause difficulty, distraction, or frustration for the users. As a result, the social networking systems see lower conversion rate from the users. For example, a user may find the registration process tedious and give up. Or a user may ignore a friend message popped up on the upper right corner of the window since this user is used to focusing on the left portion of the web page. Or a user may refuse to click an advertisement link because the advertisement is bordered by a thick black square block which has an unpleasant meaning in that user's culture. To achieve better conversion rates, social networking systems constantly run user interface tests to experiment with new interface features. If a new feature wins an A/B test against an existing feature, the new feature will replace the existing feature in the user interface. However, these interface test procedures lack consideration of users' personal style and are not adaptive to the ever-changing trend of user population inclination.